Well-Read: The Losers Club by Andrew Clement

A bright red plastic chair sat in the hallway outside the principal's office. The chair was known as the Hot Seat and Alec Spencer was in it.

Alec was a special case. Every time he had landed in the Hot Seat, he'd been caught doing something that teachers usually liked: reading.

You could say Alec Spencer is well read.

He's racked up hundreds of books he's read, and re-read, several times over. Alec uses reading as an escape strategy from everything, and he has become an expert sneak reader, reading during lessons when he needs to be listening and looking. But in sixth grade, when his grades are not even as so-so as usual, his parents are on the warpath, threatening to make sure his next visit to the Hot Seat is going to guarantee a seat in the after-school Homework Room.

Alec makes a deal with his parents. If he gets good weekly reports, he can join the less rigorous after-school Clubs Group instead. He reads the rules closely, and finding a loophole, Alec formulates a plan. He founds a reading club, and to make sure no one will interfere with his obsession, he names his group "the Losers Club" to keep most kids from joining. He suffers the teasing of his sometime friend, Kent, now class bully and current kickball champ of the Active Sports Group who continually calls him "Bookworm."

But Alec gets lucky and even gets the requisite second member in the person of a quiet fourth-grader named Lily. His plan is working. And per parental degree, seated in the center front row in every class, he's forced to pay attention and his grades immediately go up. After all, he's got three hours of undisturbed and officially approved reading to look forward to after school. Alec thinks he's beat the system.

And then he gets another applicant, a cute girl named Nina, a refugee from the Origami Group. She's read Hatchet, and is no fan of show-off Kent. Perfect.

Life is good--until Kent seems to become interested in Nina. He invites her to come over with her brother to shoot baskets on his lighted basketball court and begins to send booming kicks across the gym and onto Alec's table to show off his prowess. It's clearly a challenge that Alec needs to counter, but surprisingly other would-be book lovers are wearying with their clubs and joining his. Even Kent wants to join. Suddenly Alec is the champ reader leader! He has three tables of kids that he has to find just the right books for, and now he has to plan a presentation about his group for the fall PTA meeting.

Life in sixth grade can be complicated, especially with a special girl in the picture, as Alec learns in Andrew Clements' The Losers Club (Random House, 2017), a realistic and humorous coming-of-middle-school-age novel that sensitively explores the transitions that his many fans are experiencing. Clements' characters are well crafted, familiar, but more prototype than stereotype, offering middle readers insight into their own classmates--the groups they choose and the games they play. Author of the landmark best-seller, Frindle: Library Edition and dozens of other top-selling books, Andrew Clements is the phenom of middle-reader fiction. Says Kirkus Reviews' starred review, "Clements once again effectively taps into the challenges of middle school social politics and mapping out one’s identity. This empathetic coming-of-age journey makes it clear how limiting and pointless labels can be, and that both books and real life have quite a bit to offer."